Tag Archives: B2B

Are you ready for Decisions Spring 2011 conference, which is bound to start in less than a week, right on your desktop? For the fourth time already it’s going to deliver cutting edge content, independent views and analysis, and an immense opportunity to network with your peers, partners, or prospects.

June 16 is the NAV day and if you are reading this blog, you should be there, because it delivers some top Microsoft Dynamics NAV content, including four MVP sessions and a keynote by Joshua Greenbaum, an industry veteran and one of leading independent ERP analysts and cloud evangelists, whose Enterprise Antimatter blog has inspired many (yours truly included) while it ran at ZDNet.

Make sure you don’t miss my session, either! I’ll present some pretty cool B2B scenarios, including live vendor price lists, transactional intercompany postings, smart requisitions, and more. See you in the Cloud!

The countdown has started–it’s less than a month left to Decisions Spring 2011, the fourth virtual conference by MSDynamicsWorld.com. It’s again delivered from the comfort of your desktop, and you can attend all the presentations and mingle the expo booths in your pajamas and slippers, and nobody would care. Or know.

About the conference

This is what the conference site says about the event:

Decisions Spring 2011 is an independent conference about Microsoft Dynamics solutions organized by MSDynamicsWorld.com. This live online venue is free to attendees and supported by our sponsors. We build this event upon our leading online news and product information resources to provide a conference experience that provides the latest perspectives on Microsoft Dynamics AX, CRM, GP, and NAV.

Decisions Spring 2011 is simply the most focused and effective way to hear about real world Dynamics solutions and case studies and get practical guidance about the latest Microsoft Dynamics trends from the strategic and thought leaders across the Dynamics community. We bring together consultants, analysts, partners, customers, and more for an event that is educational, informational, and collaborative.

Don’t miss my presentation

Again, I was invited to deliver a presentation there, and this time I went for a tricky topic: business to business integration using NAV. My presentation comes with a flashy title “Harnessing the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Technology Stack for Streamlined B2B Process Integration” (a mouthful, I know) and you can read the summary by clicking here.

Make sure you don’t miss it, because there is going to be a quite cool demo in the end, showing how to integrate multiple NAV installations on process and transaction level, in two simple real-life scenarios.

NAV Day

The conference will be delivered over four days, each day being dedicated to a single Dynamics product (SL is the only product not being represented at the conference). NAV Day is June 16, and you can check the agenda here: http://decisions.msdynamicsworld.com/product/nav

There are going to be some quite interesting presentations, and four NAV MVPs will be sharing their knowledge and experience with you: Eric Wauters, Jörg Stryk, Rene Gayer, and yours truly.

Networking and meeting your peers, partners or potential prospects in the virtual expo room has always been fun and I’m totally looking forward to meeting you there!

When comparing .NET variables, including Enums, you cannot use C/AL comparison operators. To compare .NET variables, you must use the Equals method (of the System.Object type) that all .NET types implement or inherit. So, instead of IF var1 = var2, or IF var1 = var1.EnumValue (in case of an Enum), just write IF var1.Equals(var2), or IF var1.Equals(var1.EnumValue).

I see this mistake often being made or attempted by developers, even though it has been documented inside .NET Interoperability documentation since it was introduced with 2009 R2.

Make sure that you don’t access the Microsoft.Dynamics.NAV JavaScript object before the document ready event fires. If you do so, you might experience problems on Chrome when the user refreshes the browser (F5). It appears that on refresh Chrome loads (and runs) scripts in different order, and depending on how complex scripts included in your project are, your code might get executed before Microsoft’s script is loaded, and it will cause nasty script errors. This occurs only on Chrome on PC.

When you have to format C/AL variables (numbers, dates/times, booleans) for exchange with other apps, call FORMAT(variable,0,9) instead of simply FORMAT(variable). The format 9 formats the variable according to XML standards, and this value can then be interpreted correctly on any system with any regional settings. This is useful also when passing string-formatted values from C/AL to C# or JavaScript.

To check if a BLOB field has a value, you call its HASVALUE function. For example: IF Item.Picture.HASVALUE THEN;

In older versions, earlier than NAV 2009, you had to call CALCFIELDS before you could check HASVALUE, which – if you think of it, did not make much sense. This was changed in NAV 2009, so ever since that version you can check HASVALUE before you decide to call CALCFIELDS first. It makes all the sense – you don’t need to pull up to 2GB of data over just to see if anything is inside.

If you are an old-school guy (or just old, as me), and you CALCFIELDS first, HASVALUE next, maybe it’s time for you to reconsider it.

Rembember – the pattern is: IF Field.HASVALUE THEN Rec.CALCFIELDS(Field);